How a Guidance Counsellor can help with Career Burnout
/‘Stress is a reality – like love or electricity – unmistakeable in experience yet difficult to define.’[i]
Career Burnout is a form of stress. It is a gradual building up of work-related stress to the point where it is having chronically negative impacts on your life.
The Lobster Pot
Burnout is hard to recognise because what can often start as high job satisfaction becomes over time a waning optimism and eventually chronic stress. You can’t quite figure out what’s wrong but something is wrong. It’s the lobster pot metaphor: it heats up gradually and you can’t quite tell whether the problem is with you (the person) or with the pot (the context).
Burnout is depicted as having three strands: if you are feeling exhausted in your work, cynical about your work (and losing your sense of identity with it) and feeling reduced in your ability to do your work, you are exhibiting warning signs of burnout.
Fuzzy Thinking
The trouble is that stress can lead to fuzzy thinking which makes it hard to define and even harder to imagine that the solutions available to you will help. You are being asked to think clearly at a very moment where you are feeling unable to do so. It is difficult to live through something and make sense of it at the same time.
Here are the ways that I think a Guidance Counsellor can help:
1. Making Sense of What is Happening to You
Life is made up of everyday individual actions and interactions. Guidance counsellors are trained to help you bridge the divide between who you are and the world in which you exist. By making sense of what is happening to you, your understanding increases. By making meaning from your experiences, you become able to separate what you need to respond to and what is outside of your control.
Life experiences can feel like fact but the very act of talking them through with someone else can change them. This act can help you to reframe your understanding of yourself and think more clearly how the world in which you exist is impacting on you.
2. Adding in Objective Information
Sometimes an objective assessment such as a Career Assessment provides useful information to add to the context of your experiences. Tools such as an Interest Profile, a Personality Quiz or an assessment of your Career Values can help you make sense of your career issues and why your current context is no longer working for you. You can also reconnect with forgotten career aspirations and begin to consider whether your current work is still meeting your needs.
Whether you need a big change such as a change of career, or a small change such as a change in your hours, your responsibilities or your communication with direct management, assessment helps you to gain awareness of your skills and how you can use them to change your context and ultimately help you to cope.
3. It’s not You, it’s Them
Many coping strategies for stress and burnout focus on developing personal resilience. These elements, while helpful, don’t suit every person and every situation. There needs to be a recognition that sometimes people are being asked to deliver beyond what would be considered reasonable.
Example of an approach that focuses only on personal resilience. Source: hellodriven.com
This HBR article quotes a survey by Gallup that found the top five reasons for burnout are:
Unfair treatment at work
Unmanageable workload
Lack of role clarity
Lack of communication and support from their manager
Unreasonable time pressure
While a focus on personal resilience is a valuable tool, workplace practices and expectations feed into personal burnout and a person’s context needs to be addressed if they are to break the cycle. Burnout is a system problem and most likely things at work will need to change.
Knowing Yourself Better Helps You Plan For Change
The process of guidance counselling can help you to bring yourself to an a-ha moment of what kind of change you are looking for. Clarity – the very opposite of fuzzy thinking – is a major component in planning for change. By taking a step back, you begin to explore options which you have not been considering because you have been feeling overwhelmed from your current work context.
Sometimes a dilemma enhances our freedom to choose. The process of guidance counselling can give you a new vocabulary for breaking down your old coping routines and building new ways of developing your career.
i Eugene Kennedy and Sara Charles. On Becoming a Counsellor. Gill & McMillan 1977
